WORDS FOR ART

Gary Willis: POST CONCEPTUAL PAINTER

Like a Masked Traveller Drifting Through Time

31 August 2025

Words For Art is delighted to publish the first comprehensive monograph on post-conceptual painter Gary Willis.

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As a fledgling artist in late 1960s Australia, Gary Willis was amongst a vanguard of post-object artists. His interests spanned conceptual art, performance, video, installation and postmodernism. Over the ensuing five decades, Willis eschewed a singular mode of practice, opting instead for a succession of conceptual moves to produce contrasting bodies of artworks. Studying the early performance works staged by Willis, one could scarcely connect them with the artist’s later bodies of paintings, at times harking back to 18th century modes of production. And yet, this surprising monograph reveals a keen intelligence wherein familiar tropes reappear in contrasting forms, echoing a life guided by creative imperatives at all cost. 

Arts writer for London’s ‘New Statesman’, David Langsam, has written, Willis has always been something of a tearaway, growing up around south east Australia in the radical Sixties and Seventies, prepared to lose blood on stage in the name of art.

Surviving his notorious ‘Leopard’ performances (with Richard Boulez) for the Adelaide Festival and ACT #2 ACT Performance Festival, wherein Willis sustained a knife wound to the hand, he goes on to exhibit with such noteworthy galleries as Reconnaissance, Roslyn Oxley 9, and Sydney University’s Tin Sheds.

While many of his peers sought to critique all that had come before, Willis emerges as one who, having initially rejected conventional art practice, has ultimately effected a return to visual language as the foundation for his artistic expression. His later involvement with the painter Arthur Boyd proved decisive.

This new monograph reveals the extent to which Willis has operated as both an insider and an outsider within Australia’s artistic scene. Collected by many of the major Australian galleries, curated into significant exhibitions such as Australian Perspecta at the AGNSW, Musee D’Arte Moderne, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York, collected by many of his artistic associates, and lauded by a plethora of art critics, Willis has proven nothing if not perplexing, due in no small part to a restless creativity, refusing to settle on any one style or mode of creation.

‘Gary Willis: Post Conceptual Painter’ is essential reading for anyone looking for first-hand insights into the turbulent epochs of Australian art in the second half of the 20th century. As a case study, Willis covers an extraordinary array of scenes, modalities and localities, including life as a Zen monk in Japan, a New York punk, cruising clubs such as the Mudd, CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City, amongst many other sites of consciousness, many of which are self apparent in his work.

Handsomely illustrated, with a foreword by Jenny Zimmer and an introduction by curator Dr Damian Smith, this case bound edition is now available through Words For Art.

Gary Willis, born 1949, New South Wales, is a graduate of the Canberra School of Art, Preston Institute of Technology and Melbourne University. His work is represented in a number of public collections including the NGV, NGA, AGSA and AGWA. Willis is a prolific writer, documenting many chapters in his life in his publications, such as ‘Diary of a Dead Beat Modern Art Type’. His PhD thesis ‘The Key Issues Concerning Contemporary Art’ was published as a part of the University of Melbourne ‘Thesis Series’ (2010), having reached the top 1% of downloaded papers on Academia.com globally. His limited edition, boxed-set memoir of the 1980’s - ‘The Painter's Tongue: The Life of an Artist, The 1980s’ comprises 10 detailed volumes.

This publication ‘Gary Willis: Post Conceptual Painter’, provides the very first comprehensive overview of Willis’s activities as an artist of that critical generation. (Essential reading.)

For further information on ordering your copy visit: GARY WILLIS: POST CONCEPTUAL PAINTER